WASHINGTON—In scathing language against Republican wannabe-King Donald Trump, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in D.C., gave Trump-fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox her job back.
Howell’s ruling, just a day after a two-hour oral argument on the case, restores Wilcox, the board’s first-ever Black woman member and Black woman chair, to her board seat for a term that doesn’t expire until August 2028. It also restores Wilcox as the vital third member of the five-person board needed for a quorum to decide worker-boss disputes.
With Wilcox, the NLRB has two Democratic-named members, plus Republican Chairman Marvin Kaplan—whom one staff attorney told People’s World is an institutionalist, not an ideologue—and two vacancies.
“The crucial question here is, what does the U.S. Constitution allow? To start, the framers made clear no one in our system of government was meant to be king—the president included—and not just in name only,” Judge Howell declared, citing the Constitution’s check on presidential power.
Trump’s action firing Wilcox “was a blatant violation of the law” as well as the Constitution’s limits on a president “and cannot be sustained,” Judge Howell wrote.
Dozens of supporters who waited in the rain on March 5 for Wilcox’s hearing to end gave her a joyous welcome then. “What do we want? Gwynne back! When do we want it? Now!” they often chanted.
“This case is not just about me,” Wilcox told the crowd. “It is important to working people in this country, and that workers are respected,” added Wilcox, a former counsel for the Service Employees, named to the board by Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
The hearing was open to radio coverage. Listeners outside learned Judge Howell spent much of the time summarizing U.S. labor history since even before the New Deal, and before the NLRB was established, to the courtroom crowd. She repeated much of that detail in her 35-page decision.
One key point, which Trump’s Justice Department team conceded at the outset, and which the judge repeated, was Trump fired Wilcox for political reasons, thus violating labor law. The National Labor Relations Act says board members can be removed before the end of their five-year terms only for cause. Wilcox’s term ends in August 2028.
The Constitution’s “silence regarding removal does not confer absolute authority on a president to willy-nilly override a congressional judgment that expertise and insulation from direct presidential control take priority when a federal officer is tasked with carrying out certain adjudicative or administrative functions,” Judge Howell wrote.
“As Justice Louis Brandeis eloquently opined, ‘checks and balances were established in order this should be ‘a government of laws and not of men,’ observing further the separation of powers was not adopted ‘to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.’” Doing so was to save the nation “from the power of autocracy,” the judge added.
That’s despite “perceived inefficiencies, inevitable delays, and seemingly anti-democratic consequences that may flow from the checks and balances foundational to our constitutional system.
“A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
“In our constitutional order, the president is tasked to be a conscientious custodian of the law, albeit an energetic one, to take care of effectuating his enumerated duties, including the laws enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the judiciary…Historical practice and a body of case law are, respectively, instructive and binding,” severely limiting the president’s removal powers at independent agencies such as the NLRB.
The Trump regime’s Justice Department is likely to appeal Judge Howell’s ruling for Wilcox. In friend-of-the-court briefs, 19 Democratic-led states, led by Minnesota, plus D.C ., sided with Wilcox. Twenty-two Republican-led states, led by Tennessee, sided with Trump. Without naming the monarch involved —British King George III—Tennessee said basically that because the King could fire anyone he wanted, so could the president.
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